Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Three recent stories about business in El Salvador creating good jobs:

Cutuco Energy, based in Houston, will begin construction in September on a new liquefied natural gas import terminal and power plant at the port of La Unión. According to the Cutuco Energy web site, work on the facility will create 1100 jobs to build and operate the facility which will also include a water desalinization plant producing 5.5 million gallons of fresh drinking water.

An auto parts plant, run by the business Arnecom, opened in Santa Ana province. The business is funded with Japanese and Mexican capital investments and will produce more than 600 jobs.

Air Canada has acquired an interest in the aircraft maintenance subsidiary of TACA airlines and plans to move maintenance of its fleet to El Salvador. According to a recent article in EDH, the expansion will create jobs for 517 engineers and 3,447 technicians between 2008 and 2012.

That's about 5700 jobs, supporting 5700 families. Are these jobs created because of government policies? In spite of government policies? Whatever it is, El Salvador needs more of it.

Problem with these kind of jobs is that the skilled and highly skilled jobs are usually not filled by people in countries like El Salvador because they have perfectly capable people, but there are few people trained or educated for these jobs.People that fill the engineering positions will more than likely be from abroad. What I would like to see is that these companies provide research grants to the universities and technological schools to train the people to take these jobs or to eventully fill these positions.We must understand that these jobs are going to El Salvador for profiteering purposes; that does not mean that the people there cannot organize to assure that they, and not croporate interests and their salvadorian cronies.

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This is Tim's El Salvador Blog, a place for looking at what's going on in El Salvador. Participate in the discussion by adding your comments. This site began November 17, 2004. For older articles be sure and check the archives.